Firms' Choice of Method of Determining Pay: Evidence from the Industry Wage Surveys

对许多公司来说，监测工人的工作表现是一项昂贵而困难的过程，因此，有关工人生产率的信息往往是非常不完善的。虽然这一事实相当明显，但这对工人获得补偿的方式的影响却不那么明显。由于补偿方案可以对工人的生产力产生巨大的影响，工人补偿安排的含义一直是劳动经济学和经济理论的一个重要主题。雇主在多大程度上监控工人，并利用他们从监控中学到的东西来设定工资，这是一个从许多理论角度解决的话题。其中，关于计件工资与工资的文献最接近本研究开发的框架。为了更好地反映企业实际面临的选择，本项目将把这种双向选择情况扩展到计件工资、绩效工资（将工资与监管评级联系起来）和标准工资（其中工资与绩效之间只有微弱的联系）的三向选择情况。在此框架内，将纳入相关委托-代理和效率-工资文献的一些关键见解。该框架将使用工业工资调查、制造业普查和职业头衔词典的数据来开发。

Monitoring the performance of workers is a costly and difficult procedure for many firms and, thus, the information about worker productivity is often very imperfect. While this fact is fairly obvious, the implications of this for the way in which workers are compensated is not. Because compensation schemes can have an enormous impact on worker productivity, the implications of worker compensation arrangements have been an important theme in labor economics and economic theory generally. The extent to which employers monitor workers and use what they learn from monitoring in setting wages is a topic which has been tackled from a number of theoretical perspectives. Of these, the literature on piece rates vs. salaries is closest to the framework developed in this study. In order to better reflect choices actually faced by firms, this project will extend this two-way choice situation to a three-way choice situation of piece rates, merit pay (which links wages to supervisory ratings) and standard rates (in which there is only a weak link between pay and performance). Within this framework, some of the key insights of the related principal-agent and efficiency-wage literature will be incorporated. This framework will be developed using data from the Industrial Wage Survey, the Census of Manufacturing and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles.